Chapter 24: Nine Households

They came up my mother's lane at dusk, on foot, in a line.

Nine families, carrying what they could.

There were children on hips and a grandfather in a wheelbarrow, and a woman with a birdcage and a sack of flour.

I stood at the gate with Torin behind me and Joss on the porch.

I did not know what to say.

They stopped in the road.

An older man stepped out of the line.

I had known him all my life. He had taught me to tie a fishing knot when I was six.

He took off his cap.

"Luna," he said. "We were told we had until sunset."

"I'm so sorry," I said. "I didn't know she would do this."

"We did."

He looked past the cottage at the long dark hall at the foot of the valley.

My father's pack had once met there.

"The Lowell house has been shut for six years," he said. "We thought we'd ask if you'd open it."

I hadn't known I was going to cry.

"It's cold," I said. "I haven't swept it. There's no wood."

"There's wood," said the old woman with the stick, and gestured behind her.

Six men were already unloading a truck.

I opened the gate.

We cleared the Lowell hall that night, all of us, with brooms and rags and fifty lanterns.

The grandfather lit the great hearth with a splinter of my mother's cedar.

The children ran in circles over floors nobody had walked on since my father's funeral.

Someone put a bowl of stew in my hands.

Torin carried benches until his shirt stuck to him.

Nobody called him Alpha.

A boy of ten asked him if it was true he'd turned into a horse, and Torin said, gravely, "A very large dog."

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